Unlike other games and RPGs, Ploria has masteries instead of classes. Each mastery covers a specific type of magic or ability that can be combined to form unique character builds.
Masteries are meant to be combined and flavored. For example, I can use Pyromancy by itself as fire magic or I can combine it with Alchemy and flavor my potions as flasks of explosive napalms.
By combining different masteries and flavoring them, you can emulate any anime, manga, game, or fictional character you can think of. Note: Although the mastery system gives you a lot of flexibility and ways to flavor your character, Ploria is a fantasy RPG, so try to stay within the bounds of believability.
Each mastery has 6 ranks starting from the lowest (D) to the highest (X).
Each character will have three mastery slots, players are free to mix and match what mastery their character will have.
Each Mastery will start at Rank D and will have to be ranked up to increase it's power.
Earning your Fourth and final mastery slot will be earned once a character has ranked up all three masteries to the rank of B Each mastery falls under one of four categories: Defense, Offense, Support, and Switch. With the exception of the Switch.
Defense Protect allies and hinder enemies, i.e. tank.
Offense Focus on dealing damage and taking down enemies, i.e. DPS.
Support Keep allies alive and assist them in battles, i.e. healer.
Switch Masteries change how other masteries function and give them new capabilities or different flavor. You can have a max of 1 Switch Mastery.
Below will be a listed of Masteries you can choose from.
Defense Mastery
Arcanamancy: allows you to create, maintain, and control arcane items. Arcane creations often take on a semi-translucent and twinkling form. However, as you increase your mastery rank, your creations will become almost indistinguishable from actual items with minimal visual magical effects.
Once you have created an item, it will continue to exist as long as you channel energy into it. The energy required to create, maintain, and control arcane items is based on their size, weight, and quantity. When you create an item, its form must be simple, without any mechanized parts within it. However, you can make the parts necessary for a machine. As a perk, you can also control any creation you have made within view.
Arcanamancy is not suitable for direct combat — it is more effective to create arcane weapons to hurl at enemies or to empower more offensive masteries. On the other hand, Arcanamancy is incredibly powerful for defensive purposes since your arcane creations can hinder enemies and protect allies. This mastery is also highly flexible and can be used creatively in and out of battle. Astramancy: allows you to draw power from the universe itself through the manipulation of cosmic energy. Astramancy magic is themed around stars, planets, and galaxies, as well as astrology and fate.
In combat, Astramancy specializes in defense, utilizing short-term prediction and gravity spells to protect allies and hinder enemies. If used offensively, Astramancy can also weaponize these spells or release raw cosmic energy.
Prediction and gravity spells also have many creative uses outside of combat. For example, gravity spells can ease construction work and physically-demanding tasks. Meanwhile, the predictive nature of Astramancy grants you the mystical power of divination: reading and interpreting fate, fortune, premonitions, the future etc. Despite the unreliability and uncertainty of divination, it can grant you social influence with clever uses. Beast Arts: allows you to tame, handle, and train wild beasts who become loyal animal companions that travel with you on your adventure. The skills provided by Beast Arts help strengthen the bond between you and your companion, which naturally develops your teamwork in and out of combat.
Each beast comes with unique skills and abilities, granting you incredible flexibility while tackling various tasks and challenges. Some beasts also have magical evolution where a specific condition will allow them to gain a new and more powerful form, though these types of evolvable creatures are rare.
Beast Arts also grants you the ability to touch and possess beasts that are closely bonded to you. Once you take over their body, you have complete control over their body to do with it as you please. As part of Beast Arts’ magic-like abilities, you can locate any companion or wild beasts near you. Geomancy: allows you to create, shape, and manipulate earthy materials such as dirt, rock, sand, and crystal, but not metal. Geomancy spells cover a wide area and can alter the battlefield. Despite its potency, Geomancy lacks delicacy and precision.
Geomancy specializes in defense, allowing you to protect your allies with a variety of spells that mitigate damage. Offensively, Geomancy allows you to do things such as altering the battlefield, hindering enemies, and damaging them directly by hurling stones at them.
Although Geomancy is immensely powerful, its greatest strength is also a great weakness. Most Geomancy spells cover a large area, making them less effective in confined and difficult environments such as underground caves. Geomancy is also energy-intensive, so much so that the mastery passively boosts your physical fitness due to the conditioning you undergo while using it. Guard Arts grants you shield proficiency and various defensive techniques to protect yourself and others. There are two types of defensive techniques (martial and magical). You can mix and match or specialize in one over the other. Shields can be used together with the defensive techniques you choose.
Magical Defense Techniques. Resist, alter, steal, disrupt, nullify spells or magical effects targeted at you or your allies.
Guard Arts can deal damage through defensive techniques or by weaponizing shields. This mastery can also be combined with more offensive masteries for greater effects. Hydromancy allows you to create, shape, and manipulate water and ice. Hydromancy specializes in defense, giving you plenty of ways to protect yourself and your allies while hindering enemies. Hydromancy is incredibly versatile and offers many creative uses for its spells in and out of combat. Water. Water is difficult to shape and control, but it is often readily accessible and takes less energy to create. Water spells tend to conjure water in abundance.
Ice. Ice can be shaped and manipulated much easier. You have more control and precision over what you can physically create with ice. However, freezing water to form ice or creating ice crystals out of thin air and maintaining their shape requires more energy.
If you can utilize both elements' strengths and find the workarounds for their weaknesses, Hydromancy can become incredibly powerful and versatile in and out of combat. Illusion Magic allows you to create, customize, and control illusions. With this magic, you can cause your targets to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste things that do not exist or trap them in a make-believe reality.
Despite its powerful mind-bending effects, Illusion Magic only manipulates the victim's perception—it is not mind-control. Although Illusion Magic specializes in defense, it can physically damage the enemy by convincing them that the illusions are real.
With Illusion Magic, you are granted complete control and customization of your illusions. You can apply your illusionary spell effects to an area, multiple targets, a single target, even yourself. When you construct an illusion, you can build every element in the fantasy, showing your target precisely what you want as though you're directing a movie or a stage play. You can control your illusion in real-time or have a host of pre-crafted illusions ready for use.
Aeromancy allows you to create, shape, and manipulate air and lightning. By utilizing air and lightning, Aeromancy grants you incredible flexibility and creative solutions to many tasks in and out of combat.
Air. Air spells are versatile and can use the natural wind currents, making it energy-efficient. Air also allows you to do things such as pushing or pulling others, slowing your fall, and increasing your speed. In combat, air spells can cut your targets with blasts of razor-sharp winds. Air’s major con is its lack of precise control, making it difficult when you want to blast enemies off a platform without blowing your allies away at the same time. Short-term Flight is also possible with air.
Lightning. Lightning is concentrated, making lightning-related spells more precise and damaging. In combat, lightning can stun and devastate enemies. The main tradeoff for lightning is the high energy cost. Lightning is also conductive and reactive, which can quickly become uncontrollable if you’re not careful. Regardless, lightning has a lot of creative uses out of combat. For example, it can produce electricity, which can be combined with other masteries for great effects.
Crush Weapons grants you proficiency with heavy weapons that use raw strength to bludgeon and crush enemies. Crush weapons are the most destructive of all the weapon-types — they fully embrace brute force to lay waste to enemies and their surroundings. In exchange for its power, crush weapons requires a specific skillset to work around any unwieldiness.
Crush Weapons grants you proficiency with power tools such as mining picks, hammers, etc. Considering the demanding physical requirements to use these heavy and unwieldy weapons and tools, Crush Weapons also grants you increased physical strength and endurance. With these boosted traits, you can easily handle large, heavy, and unwieldy things regardless of your body type. Users of Crush Weapons can develop large and defined musculature, but that’s not always the case.
Dark Magic allows you to create, shape, and manipulate dark energy. Dark Magic draws its power from the negative emotions and states such as fear, anger, suffering, and death that tend to collect and fester among large populations of humanoids. Dark Magic is a terrifying force that can go awry at a moment’s notice. However, beyond the dangers of Dark Magic lies an unimaginable wellspring of magical power beyond mortal comprehension.
Dark Magic is powered by a vile magical energy so potent and volatile that it is just as likely to harm and taint you as it would your enemy. To get around the dangers of Dark Magic, many users tap into the dark energy in bursts or employ indirect spellcasting methods such as curses, rituals, or spells that output its immense power over time. Those who recklessly use Dark Magic through direct means often risk ruining or destroying their body in exchange for short term power boosts.
Martial Arts grants you expertise in unarmed combat, allowing you to perform combinations of deadly strikes with any part of your body. With Martial Arts, you can easily weave together strings of attacks to form or mimic specific fighting styles or mix and match the various forms to develop your own unique fighting style.
Besides allowing you to fight without weapons, Martial Arts also grants your body supernatural abilities. You can do things such as break boulders, stop weapons, and fight toe to toe with any magic or weapon user, all with your bare hands. You also gain access to a martial energy that allows you to perform mystical fighting maneuvers without magic.
Pyromancy allows you to create, shape, and manipulate fire and heat. Pyromancy is naturally potent and destructive, making it challenging to control and tune the massive power output of fire-based abilities and spells.
Pyromancy spells affect large areas and are often bombastic, making it a bit difficult to use while you’re in a group. Pyromancy features some of the most fearsome destructive spells, capable of razing large swathes of land or a big group of enemies. If you can embrace and tame the calamitous and unpredictable drawbacks of Pyromancy, you will have access to one of the best magic masteries for combat and tasks where raw magical force is needed. Shadow Arts allows you to create, control, and utilize the shadows to perform magic-like martial abilities. These black mists can fuel deadly attacks, stealthy maneuvers, or short-distance teleportation and transposition.
Shadow Arts grants you expertise in acrobatics and sleight of hand. It also gives you access to magic-like abilities and attacks that employ shadows. Shadow Arts is comparable to ninjutsu or rogue/assassin techniques in pop culture. Shadow Arts has many creative applications in and out of combat – the perks it provides allow you to excel at thievery, spying, scouting, or assassination. Slash Weapons grants you proficiency with bladed weapons that cut, cleave, and hack. Slash weapons have a perfect balance of speed, power, and accuracy, making them highly reliable and versatile. Although it is easy to pick up and use slash weapons thanks to their accessibility, mastering them is often an arduous process.
Unlike crush or pierce weapons, slash weapons do not have specific fighting styles or techniques. This absence of structured styles allows you to define your own, switching between them when necessary. The open-ended nature of slash weapons and the need to define your fighting style is why it is so difficult to master Slash Weapons. Pierce Weapons grants you proficiency with thrust weapons, which are easy to wield and thus increase your movement potential. Pierce Weapons allows you to navigate the battlefield with grace, sets you up to exploit enemies’ weaknesses, and allows you to capitalize on mistakes.
Pierce Weapons prioritizes swift, sharp, and deadly attacks compared to other weapon masteries, trading consistent damage for large bursts that leave enemies devastated. The built-in mobility allows you to reposition yourself or set yourself up in advantageous positions, making Pierce Weapons highly effective for surprise attacks.
Alchemy grants you the ability to mix reagents and synthesize potions that can produce magic-like effects. Alchemy allows you to buff and heal allies through supportive potions while damaging enemies with explosive or poisonous potions. Despite its complexity, Alchemy is highly unique and offers a ton of utility.
Since Alchemy is not inherently magical, its users must carry an alchemical kit, usually in the form of a backpack. This kit stores the equipment and reagents necessary to synthesize potions on the fly. Fortunately, Alchemy allows you to fill any alchemical container with water, reducing your load.
If you are not interested in live synthesis, you can synthesize potions and store them for later use. Some Alchemists take premade potions into battle and focus their efforts on using the right potion at the right time instead of spending that valuable time on potion synthesis.
Considering that Alchemy allows you to produce magic-like effects, there are many creative applications for it in and out of combat. For example, you can become an apothecary with your knowledge of medicine, synthesize explosives for mining, or produce acid, poison, oil, or other domestic-use chemicals. Alchemy also works well with other masteries, allowing you to manifest magic through potions instead of regular spellcasting. Harmonic Magic grants you powerful supportive abilities that are expressed through music, dance, or flow. Compared to other magic mastery, Harmonic Magic is much more subtle and only affect living things rather than inanimate things.
In combat, Harmonic magic can support allies who can see or hear your performance. Enemies can also be psychologically hindered or damaged in the same way. Harmonic Magic has three main magical expressions. In order to have a cohesive theme for your character, focus on a specific expression of Harmonic Magic that best fits your character and exclude the rest.
Music. Harmonic Magic can be expressed through countless types of music such as singing and instrument playing.
Dance. Dance includes anything from the classical meaning of dance, which includes a wide variety of styles, to more interpretive movements such as sword dancing. The important is that it is visual.
Flow. Flow has its own unique rhythm and include things that are neither music and dance such as poetry, story, speech, shout, whistle, flag bearing, or anything else that fits the theme of a military commander inspiring his or her troop.
Out of combat, Harmonic Magic can subtly manipulate or influence people's emotions, perceptions, and social behaviors such as swiftly changing the mood of a room of people through magical means. You can use this magic to subtly affect other's perception of you. If morality is not an issue for you, you could manipulate others as well, though the effect of your spells depends on their natural resistance. Nature Magic allows you to create, shape, and manipulate plant life and nature's magical energy. With Nature Magic, you can harness nature or plant's power to support allies and harm your enemies.
Some ways you can support allies with Nature Magic includes healing them with nature's energy or create magical berries they can eat to recover health. Buffing could be a spell that wrap their weapon in a thorny vine that deals extra damage.
Nature Magic also allows you to do things such as speeding up plant growth, temporarily enlarging or shrinking plants, manipulating plant’s movement, conjure bark on your body, etc. Nature Magic also allows you to communicate simple thoughts with plants or temporarily possess a plant's body and control it like your own. Mend allows you to perform supportive abilities (heal, buff, cleanse, etc.) through the base-mastery, essentially turning any offensive or defensive mastery into a supportive one. Mend also boosts your supportive abilities, making them more potent in and out of battle.
Aura grants you an aura that is themed around the base-mastery, essentially giving any mastery defensive capabilities through that aura. Aura also boosts your defense.
Your aura can actively and passively protect you and your allies with skills related to the base mastery. For example, suppose you are combining Aura with Pyromancy. In that case, you might have a fiery aura, which you can extend to your ally to vaporize incoming attacks and reduce the damage they'll take. In this example, you’re flavoring your Protect action with Pyromancy. Battle Spirits allows you to enter an empowered state themed around the base-mastery. Battle Spirits is essentially a powerup mode that vastly increases your martial combat ability at the cost of immense Mana consumption. While Battle Spirits is compatible with all mastery, it exists to empower martial characters.
There are two components to Battle Spirits: the empowered form and the mental state. The empowered form provides slight changes to your body. Any visual changes you undergo are an addition to your body instead of completely changing your body’s biology like Metamorph. The most common visual effect involves your body being covered with magical or martial energy. While in this form, your body becomes more resilient to damage and pain.
The mental state on the other hand is a mental state that is usually the byproduct of entering the empowered form. Some examples include: rage, berserk, frenzy, insanity, monster-mode, or battle-focused. This mental state is entirely optional. Corrupt empowers you by drawing from the most uncontrollable and destructive force in the universe: chaos, which warps and distorts everything it comes into contact with. Corrupt turns the base-mastery into a darker and more sinister version of itself, granting you a hefty increase in martial and magical powers at the cost of safety as you corrupt yourself. How much are you willing to risk for power?
Corrupt works with all mastery as chaos distorts both martial and magical mastery. Corrupt infuses the base-mastery with themes related to Lovecraft, the grotesque, reality distortion, or other dark motifs. For example, Corrupt + Mend Magic allows you to reverse heal, damaging others through a violet holy energy, but doing so gradually make you more resistant toward heals from others. Corrupt + Beast Arts allows you to distort your beast companion, giving it tentacles to increase its power ala Nina (Fullmetal Alchemist).
To get the most out of Corrupt, think about creative ways to put a dark twist on the mastery you're corrupting. Dynamism grants you immense speed and movement capabilities themed around the base-mastery’s flavor. Dynamism allows you to zip around the battlefield with ease.
Since the potential for speed and mobility exists in all mastery, Dynamism can be combined with any mastery. Through the theme of the base-mastery, Dynamism extends your mobility with things like: speed, maneuverability, short-term flight, and teleportation, all of which allows you to zip around the battlefield or reposition yourself with ease.
The biggest drawback of Dynamism, however, is that it solely specializes in speed and mobility. It can be taxing on stamina. Hyper Sense grants you complete awareness of your surroundings, allowing you to use the base-mastery defensively by increasing your visual perception. Hyper Sense also allows you to use magic or activate other abilities with your eyes.
Hyper Sense specializes in visual acuity, which significantly increases your precision, accuracy, and defense. With Hyper Sense, you can become a long-distanced siege mage or use your any offense or support mastery to protect yourself and your allies. Hyper Sense can be activated at will. While activated, it grants your eyes a visual effect themed around the base-mastery. Metamorph allows you to physically morph your entire body or parts of it into a form flavored around the base-mastery. While in your morphed form (referred to as metamorph), you gain characteristics and capabilities associated with the form such as increased speed, short-term flight, enhanced strength or agility, etc.
The metamorph requires stamina to maintain. When you morph parts of your body (horns + one or two limbs, OR a set of wings + a tail, OR four limbs), the stamina cost is manageable. However, total body transformations consume a lot of stamina and are meant for short term use. The stamina expenditure scales exponentially based on the size of the metamorph and additional limbs that you do not have on your real body. Due to the limitation, most metamorph tend to be bigger-sized beasts or slightly larger than average humanoids and not any larger.
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